11 May How To Generate Higher Quality Leads For Your Sales Team
Your marketing team plays a critical role in generating leads for your sales team for prospecting. Every marketer’s goal is to create more leads. While that is not a wholly ineffective approach, it is more advisable to work on generating high-quality leads that convert.
Salespeople would rather have a few high-quality leads that convert instead of chasing down hundreds of leads that amount to nothing. Casting a wide net is not an advisable technique in lead generation because it wastes the sales team’s time, negatively impacting their productivity.
Lead generation should be about quality, not quantity. Your time, resources, and efforts should be spent on high-quality leads that convert into paying clients. This way, your sales team is more motivated and productive, and you get a higher return on your investment. Generating better lead quality requires work, but it’s worth it in the long run.
6 Effective Ways To Generate Higher Quality Leads
Generating high-quality leads isn’t a walk in the park. Here’s how to improve lead quality.
1. Ask the Right Qualifying Questions
People interested in your product or service are not necessarily leads — they are inquiries. A person becomes a lead once they are sales-ready. You must develop a system to weed through multiple inquiries and determine the viable sales leads that can be passed on to your sales team.
An effective lead qualification process involves asking questions. For this approach to be effective, you must ask the right questions. When creating forms, keep in mind that lengthy and tedious forms are discouraging, and people are generally wary of giving up too much information. It’s important to strike a balance 一 the form should be short enough to boost conversions but long enough to ask qualifying questions.
The responses you get will help you gauge high-quality leads and disqualify inquiries with bogus information. This step involves removing duplicates and invalid email addresses and contact information. This significantly boosts your conversion rate because your sales team approaches only sales-ready people.
Here are a few examples of sales qualification questions:
- How did you hear about us?
- Are you the decision-maker?
- What problems are you facing?
- How have you tried to solve them?
- Why are you switching?
- What made you choose our brand?
- What are your priorities?
- What is your budget?
- How soon are you planning to make the purchase?
- What is the best way to contact you moving forward?
2. Work on Your Lead Scoring System
Developing a dynamic lead scoring system is key for prioritization. Using the data from the forms, you can assign numerical points to each lead on a scale from “interested” to “sales-ready.” The criteria you use for your scoring system are entirely up to you, but you must ensure they are uniform across all departments so that everyone is using the same scale.
You can use metrics like the information provided, actions taken, or the level of engagement with your brand to score your leads. Your sales team should be responsible for determining the lead scoring system. The higher the lead’s score, the closer they are to becoming a sales-qualified lead, and the easier it is to convert them to a customer.
Your lead scoring system and the criteria you use in the scale should not be static. You may have to tweak and fine-tune them along the way until you find the perfect formula for transforming lead generation into customer generation.
Automating lead management is one of the best ways to streamline lead generation quality and lead scoring systems. Automation can help you overcome the ever-changing demographic and psychographic elements of prospects.
3. Invest in Nurturing Leads
According to invesp, companies that invest in lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost. Just because a lead is not sales-ready now does not mean they’re not valuable to you. Lead nurturing is the process of developing a relevant and consistent dialogue with viable consumers, even if they won’t buy immediately.
Most sales prospects require lead nurturing. It is important to build meaningful relationships with your prospective clients. This means you need to pay attention to their needs and offer content relevant to them at a given time. Providing meaningful information instead of generic, flowery sales pitches is more likely to lead to conversion.
You can use newsletters, email, and SMS — provided you get consent — to dispense helpful content to your potential customers. The goal is to contact people in whatever channels they prefer with helpful, relevant, and valuable information.
4. Split Your Lead Funnel
Sales funnels are not one-size-fits-all. Your leads are diverse in their needs and sales readiness, and your funnel should reflect this. The primary purpose of this funnel is to bring all leads into one spot and then qualify them. This critical stage helps determine the leads ready to talk to a sales rep and those who need nurturing.
To streamline operations, you ought to route leads into different buckets. The bigger and more elaborate you make your marketing pipeline, the easier it is to develop your sales pipeline as well. This way, you’re generating not just leads but actionable, convertible leads.
5. Continuously Measure Lead Generation Effectiveness
Like any other marketing strategy, it is vital to measure the effectiveness of lead generation and how much it is contributing to revenue. You need metrics that measure and report on the success of quality lead generation since the goal is to limit leads to high-quality ones.
Developing a lead generation plan takes a lot of adjustment because it is a learning process through which you determine which marketing campaigns resonate best with your target audience and lead to conversions. This needs continuous measurement and reporting for effective executive decision-making.
Some marketing measurements to consider include the following:
- The number of leads you generate in a given period
- How the generated leads move through the various stages you’ve developed before they are converted into sales
- How much time each type of lead takes to move through the entire system
- What marketing programs resonate most with people and generate more leads, and what are their conversion rates
Studying lead behavior will help you actively maintain the leads in your sales pipeline. Using marketing automation removes the guesswork, leading to more accuracy. It also saves you time and effort.
6. Sales Alignment
Coming up with an effective lead generation strategy is not enough. Companies often have highly effective marketing strategies but struggle with conversion rates due to poor sales alignment. Sales reps are more likely to follow up on leads if the qualification criteria were agreed upon in advance.
There must be a continuous collaboration between the sales and marketing teams to increase effectiveness and grow revenue. They should work together and co-develop lead qualification strategies, t from defining a high-quality lead to establishing a lead scoring scale and making improvements to it along the way.
Soliciting feedback from the sales team on lead quality and taking their suggestions on other metrics will help optimize your lead generation strategy.
Are You Ready To Start the Conversation With Higher Quality Leads?
Effective lead generation helps you attract and engage potential paying clients for your business. This strategy aims to turn leads into sales as quickly as possible and reduce the number of lost sales.
At Aktify, we aim to connect consumers with your brand through positive experiences. Get in touch with us today, and let us build authentic, meaningful connections between you and your consumers. We activate interested sales prospects and deliver them as inbound phone calls to your sales team, using our science-first technology approach that integrates with CRMs and marketing automation platforms.
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